Deliberate practice in the working world.
A while back I talked about “deliberate practice” in the context of Will Smith’s career. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has been a pioneer in codifying deliberate practice and what it means.
In a nutshell, deliberate practice is the sort of self-sharpening work done by the very best practitioners in a field. It’s the sort of always-getting-better discipline shared by the best athletic performers (think Tiger Woods), the best musicians (think Yo-Yo Ma), or the best . . . well, the best anything, potentially.
While I was first introduced to the concept by a Geoff Colvin article in Fortune magazine, I think we’ve barely, barely tapped the potential of this idea for changing the way we think of our individual performances in the working world. It’s an idea I plan to return to in future posts.
This post, meanwhile, is one of those publish-it-now, keep-adding-later numbers: I’m going to use it for collecting links to interesting items on deliberate practice. Here’s my list as it stands now:
- [PDF link!] Anders Ericsson et al.: “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” — This is the article that started it all. (A summary of the article is available here.)
- Geoff Colvin in Fortune magazine: What it takes to be great
- Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: A Star Is Made: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly
- WiseBread: How to become an expert
- The Practice of Leadership: Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership
- Daniel Goleman: Peak Performance: Why Records Fall
- Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice: An updated excerpt from Ericsson (2000)
- The Age (of Australia): E=mc2 (and a lot of hard work)
- The Sydney Morning Herald: Why only the right kind of practice gets anywhere near perfect
- On his blog, Jason Kottke has a category dedicated to deliberate practice.
- Time Magazine: The Science of Experience (I have to say that I thought the application of deliberate practice to Clinton, McCain, and Obama was strained. But some other parts were good.)
- The Simple Dollar blog: Deliberate Practice and Personal Finance (Good, straightforward application that reaches beyond finance.)
- ImprovedLives: How to be an Expert at Anything - Stu describes how the work of Ericsson and his colleagues has motivated him in setting huge goals.
- [Added 8/26/08] Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids: The Science of Success
- . . .
That dot-dot-dot is for YOU. If you know of other articles that might make a good addition to this list, please note them in the comments.
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SciAm had a great special issue on developing experts which aligns with this thesis very well. You can buy and dload a PDF by going here: http://tinyurl.com/4uyxk9
Everybody’s been greatly moved by Randy Pausch’s story but most haven’t seen his 2nd great on-line lecture on “Time Management” which implicitly lays out his approach to self-management and development. You can find it via many sources, e.g. Wiki.
Dave — Thanks for this comment and the Scientific American link.
It’s funny you should mention Pausch’s time-management talk, because I was just listening to that last weekend. Here’s the link for that talk:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758
Companies would be well served to remember that the ONLY truly finite resource is TIME. All companies should make it a priority not to waste their people’s time.
[...] my search for more articles about “deliberate practice,” I came across this piece in TIME [...]